I want to believe, I really do, in the concept of a Top 10 — of employing rigor and discipline and dispassionate analysis to arrive at a best-of list that’s as indisputable as gravity and as adulated as a Kardashian.

But who are we kidding? Choosing what makes the cut for one of these things is like trying to pick out a single puppy at the pound: Pretty soon you want to take them all home (even the ones that maybe made a little mess of things).

So before our Top 10 in San Diego theater for 2011, a quick run-through of the Just-Missed-It 20:

2. “Cabaret,” Cygnet Theatre: Karson St. John’s subversive turn as the friendly-turned-menacing Emcee (a role usually played by a man) was the centerpiece of Sean Murray’s frightfully fine production.

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3. “Sleeping Beauty Wakes,” La Jolla Playhouse: The world-premiere musical infused the old fairy tale with a modern-day vibe, in a show driven by Aspen Vincent’s star turn and Brendan Milburn’s distinctive score.

4. “Angels In America,” Ion Theatre: The unstoppable Hillcrest company pulled out all the stops (or is that redundant?) in staging both parts of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning epic - and doing it with humor, raw emotion and some of the year’s sharpest acting.

5: “Milk Like Sugar,” La Jolla Playhouse: Kirsten Greenidge’s world-premiere play (which went on to run off-Broadway) captured vividly the big dreams, fleeting fixations and unspoken agonies among a set of struggling, spiritually undernourished teens.

6: “Next to Normal,” Broadway/San Diego (touring show): Onetime San Diegan Alice Ripley took her Tony-winning Broadway role as a bipolar suburban mom on the road, and showcased the power of this intimate but unstinting rock musical about a family in meltdown. (The piece won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.)

8. “The Tempest,” Old Globe Theatre: If you didn’t love it for Miles Anderson’s beautifully calibrated turn as the conflicted sorcerer Prospero, you had to love it for director Adrian Noble’s ravishing visual sense and Shaun Davey’s haunting original music.

10. “Peer Gynt,” La Jolla Playhouse: So weird. So confusing. So not-following-the-rules. So much fun. David Schweizer’s mad refashioning of the Ibsen epic dared to dream. And if that dream sometimes looked like a particularly fun-loving hallucination (three-headed trolls! deliberately bad lip-syncing!), you still had to say of this tale about a hero’s journey: What a trip.